PULSE GAMINGWhy GTA 6 Had to Go Back to Vice City
On April 4, 1995, a small team at DMA Design in Dundee started work on a police chase game called Race'n'Chase. According to The Guardian, it missed every milestone it set. That stubborn project became Grand Theft Auto, a series that's shipped over 475 million units and is now headed back to Vice City. Production was meant to end by July 1, 1996. Instead it dragged on for four years, through a new name and several attempts to kill it. Its fifth numbered game made $1 billion in three days. And that was only the start of it. In December 2023, the GTA 6 trailer pulled 101 million views in two days. This is the story of how a top-down crime game from Scotland became the biggest entertainment brand on Earth. It's also the story of why it went home to Vice City. But to understand how it got there, we have to go back to Dundee, and a cop game nobody could finish.
Dundee, Scotland, April 4, 1995. A small team at DMA Design starts work on a game called Race'n'Chase. The design document, credited to K.R. Hamilton, describes something modest. It promises "a fun, addictive and fast multi-player car racing and crashing game which uses a novel graphics method." You'd play a police officer, chasing criminals through a city seen from straight above. It's a sensible pitch. It's also the version of this series that almost nobody remembers, because the biggest decision DMA made was admitting its own premise was boring. The schedule didn't survive contact with the game. According to The Guardian, DMA set specific milestones, and it met none of them. Production was meant to end on July 1, 1996. Instead, development stretched toward four years, with a title change and numerous attempts by the people overseeing it to shut it down. Each time, the crew had to talk them into letting the work continue. Versions planned for the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 never shipped. In early 1997, project leader Keith Hamilton was still candid about it. "GTA was harder than we thought," he said, adding that the team was rewriting the car handling.
The real fix wasn't technical. Race'n'Chase was considered dull, so the team flipped the chase around and put you on the other side of the law. Creative director Gary Penn traced the idea to Elite and to games like Syndicate and Mercenary that the team had in mind. He called the result "basically Elite in a city." Producer David Jones cited Pac-Man instead: the player runs over pedestrians and gets chased by police, much like Pac-Man and the ghosts. Penn summed up the pivot in one line: "nobody wants to be the cop, it's more fun to be bad." That freedom to play however you wanted was exactly what made the game a target. Grand Theft Auto drew controversy over its violent content before it even launched, with discussions about banning its sale. The marketing campaign, organized by publicist Max Clifford, didn't fight that reaction. It exploited the stirring of controversy as free promotion. Which, for a publisher, is the cheapest ad buy there is. In Brazil, the Justice Ministry went further and banned the game outright, at a time when the country was confronting homicides and fatal auto accidents.
BMG Interactive released it in Europe for MS-DOS and Windows on November 28, 1997, with PlayStation following on December 12. North America waited until March 24, 1998 on PC, through ASC Games, and June 30 on PlayStation, through Take-Two Interactive. Critics were split. IGN called the graphics "really quite shoddy" and blamed "fast-food programming and careless design." GameSpot admitted the visuals looked "a little plain" but praised the radio stations and the freedom. Next Generation gave it 4 out of 5. Reviews were mixed, but sales weren't. The game was a commercial success. Success meant more, and fast. In 1999, two expansions moved the action to 1960s England: Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 and London 1961. Grand Theft Auto 2 arrived in October 1999. That same month, a Game Boy Color version shipped in Europe on October 22, converting the cities tile for tile but toning down most of the gore and swearing. Its publisher was a name you hadn't seen on the first box: Rockstar Games. The satire had found its voice. The camera, though, was still stuck overhead. It wouldn't stay there much longer.
In 1999, a small group at DMA Design in Edinburgh built a tech demo on Sega's Dreamcast. They weren't the Grand Theft Auto 2 team. They were the people behind Space Station Silicon Valley, and Rockstar had been pressing its studios for a 3D open world. Support engineer Alan Jack described the idea as Body Harvest's exploration mixed with Space Station Silicon Valley's city level. To avoid stepping on the other team's toes, they didn't use the Grand Theft Auto name at all. Internally, it started life as a Godzilla project. Then the ownership changed. Take-Two Interactive acquired DMA from Infogrames in September 1999, and the two teams were merged. The combined group began Grand Theft Auto 3 on the Dreamcast, then switched to the PlayStation 2 after four months. Technical director Obbe Vermeij said the reason wasn't hardware. It had become clear the Dreamcast wasn't commercially viable. He called the move disappointing, since the staff were big fans of Phantasy Star Online. Rockstar also offered the game to Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. Microsoft declined, citing its adult nature and the poor sales of earlier games, which aged about as well as you'd expect.
The ambition came from the top. Executive producer Sam Houser had always wanted the series in 3D, and the PS2's 2000 launch made a large world finally seem possible. The game ran on RenderWare, Criterion Games' engine. Art director Aaron Garbut put the goal simply: other games were a thing you played, but this should be a place you lived in. The DVD format gave the team far more room than a CD for animation, music and streets. The console's 32 megabytes of RAM, though, still felt tight for a game this size. Making it work took tricks. By mid-2000, the team had a prototype of carjacking running alongside a stable streaming model. Streaming was meant only for music and map geometry, but it grew once they saw how much data the game needed to move. Not everything survived. A planned online multiplayer mode was dropped for lack of time and resources. Even the voice work was hard to count. Producer Dan Houser said there were about 8,000 recorded lines, while audio programmer Raymond Usher estimated about 18,000.
The city itself changed shape mid-build. The first version was what Dan Houser called a generic post-industrial Midwest and East Coast hybrid. Once the team worked inside it, they realized a real model gave them more to say. So Liberty City, first seen in 1997, was rebuilt loosely on New York. It became three islands: an industrial Brooklyn and Queens, a Manhattan-style center and New Jersey-like suburbs. They unlocked as the story went on, because the team wanted you to start out feeling poor and work toward being richer. Sam Houser called it a cross between a gangster movie and an RPG. Then the real New York changed everything around it. After the September 11 attacks, Rockstar delayed the game so the team could change references and gameplay deemed inappropriate. It reached PlayStation 2 in North America on October 23, 2001. The Windows version followed in May 2002, held back on purpose so the port would be high quality. Earlier games had struggled with simultaneous launches, and the team didn't want to repeat that.
It landed hard. Critics praised the concept, the gameplay, the sound and the visuals, while its violent and sexual content drew controversy. It was the best-selling video game of 2001. It moved over 11.6 million copies on PS2 alone and more than 14.5 million overall. Today it's considered a landmark of the open world, and one of the most significant games of its console generation. The team had built a city you could stand inside. A year later, Rockstar would leave it for somewhere warmer. It's late 2001, and Grand Theft Auto 3 is nearly finished. Inside Rockstar North, a core team of about 50 people is already building 3D models for whatever comes next. Nobody outside the studio knows it yet. Within a year, that team would trade Liberty City's gray streets for pastel suits, palm trees and a radio dial stuck in the 1980s. The bet was simple to say and hard to pull off. Could the open-world formula carry a star actor and an entire era?
It didn't start as a sequel. After Grand Theft Auto 3 reached Windows, the team discussed a mission pack with new weapons, vehicles and missions. The more they talked, the bigger it got, until the add-on became a stand-alone game. Executive producer Sam Houser later said "it really kicked off at the beginning of 2002", and that push lasted about nine months. It was also Rockstar North's most expensive game at the time. The development budget was $5 million. Marketing got $13.2 million, more than twice that. The setting did the heavy lifting. Vice City is a fictional Miami, set in 1986 across two main islands. The story borrows from real history: the crack epidemic, Miami's drug lords, Cuban, Haitian and biker gangs, and the dominance of glam metal. Its biggest influences came from the screen, most notably Scarface and Miami Vice. The team did extensive field research in Miami to get it right. Into that world walks Tommy Vercetti, fresh out of prison, caught up in an ambushed drug deal and looking for whoever set him up.
Then came the sound. Vice City has 8,000 lines of recorded dialogue, four times as many as Grand Theft Auto 3. It carries over 90 minutes of cutscenes and nine hours of music, with more than 113 songs and commercials. Sam Houser had called the last game's music "clearly satirical and its own thing." This time the team curated real 1980s songs, which took extensive research. Talk radio tripled, built on the experience of producer and host Lazlow Jones. Dan Houser felt those stations gave the world depth. Rockstar announced the game at E3 on May 22, 2002. In September, it pushed the October 22 release back a week to October 29, to meet product demand. That's a rare reason for a delay, and a confident one. By October 15, development stopped and the discs went to manufacturing. The demand was real. Vice City sold over 500,000 copies in its first 24 hours. Within two days, it reached 1.4 million, making it the fastest-selling game in history at the time.
Critics agreed. Metacritic's average landed at 95 out of 100, its highest-rated PlayStation 2 game of 2002. Edge wrote that Tommy "sweats charisma", crediting Ray Liotta's performance. IGN's Douglass Perry called the soundtrack "the most impressive list of songs in a game." Not everything shone, though. Reviewers flagged the controls, the AI, long load times and frame rate drops. The game also drew controversy over its depiction of violence and racial groups. Still, it was the best-selling game of 2002, and it's sold over 17.5 million copies overall. Vice City settled the question its team had set out to answer. A GTA game could carry a famous voice, a licensed decade and a city with a personality of its own. Rockstar would come back to these streets with a prequel, Vice City Stories, in 2006, and again with Grand Theft Auto 6. But first, the studio wanted something bigger than one city. Two years later, it would build a whole state, and the size of that ambition would bring trouble nobody planned for.
Late 2004, Rockstar paid artists to paint its next game onto city walls by hand. The hand-painted ads went up around the world, and one in Melbourne, Australia, was still partly visible in 2020. That's a longer shelf life than most games get. The game was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and it reached PlayStation 2 in North America on October 26, a week later than first planned. It would become the biggest game the console ever had. It would also prove that a series this large couldn't stay out of trouble. The work started right after Vice City shipped in October 2002. Rockstar North's 50-person team grew to 75 once Manhunt came out in 2003, and the testing department went from 60 people to 100. Vice City had been made in a year. San Andreas got two, and the team used that time to rethink the earlier games. Producer Leslie Benzies said he hoped it would "revolutionize open-ended gameplay and video game production values." Rockstar even pushed The Warriors from 2004 to 2005 to free up resources. The budget still came in under $10 million.
That ambition had a cost, and some of the people paying it said so. Developers hadn't had a proper break after Vice City. Programmer Gary Foreman feared the company had entered a "constant crunch," with some staff working 17 hours a day. Some left after disagreeing with Rockstar president Sam Houser about working conditions. One long-time employee quit in objection to how Rockstar portrayed African Americans. He also objected to what he saw as a gloomier, more exploitative tone in San Andreas and Manhunt. What they built was a whole state. The first plan was three separate maps linked by public transport. It became one map, with three cities separated by countryside and desert. Los Santos was modeled on Los Angeles, San Fierro on San Francisco and Las Venturas on Las Vegas. The world covered 14 square miles, four to six times larger than GTA 3 or Vice City. Each city was roughly the size of Vice City on its own. Mountains, forests and a desert appeared for the first time in the series. Art director Aaron Garbut even gave each city its own sky: red-orange over Los Santos, blue over San Fierro, red over Las Venturas.
Size wasn't the whole point, though. The team traveled to each city to research and photograph it. Garbut felt Los Angeles's gang territory was hard to capture without seeing it firsthand. Los Angeles natives DJ Pooh, Estevan Oriol and Mister Cartoon helped Rockstar get the city's 1990s street culture right. The story followed Carl "CJ" Johnson, who comes home in 1992 after his mother's murder and finds his old gang in decline. Its plot drew on real events: the Bloods and Crips rivalry, the crack epidemic, the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Rampart scandal. Under the hood, Rockstar rewrote the RenderWare render pipeline for 35 to 50 percent more polygons on screen. It added real-time reflections and full shadows for stealth. About 16,000 unique objects filled the map, and you could cross it without Vice City's loading screens. Critics praised the characters, story and open world. Mission design, technical issues and the portrayal of race drew mixed responses. The sales weren't mixed at all. San Andreas sold over 17.3 million copies on PS2, more than any other game on the console, and 27.5 million overall.
Then players found something Rockstar never meant them to see. Buried in the game was a hidden sex minigame that became known as "Hot Coffee." Its discovery set off a controversy and briefly forced San Andreas to be re-rated Adults Only. The best-selling game on PS2 had suddenly become a problem for its own publisher. The series had never sold more, and it had never been watched this closely. When Grand Theft Auto 4 arrived in April 2008, it would be a very different kind of game. It's November 2004, and San Andreas has been on store shelves for barely a month. Inside Rockstar, preliminary work on the next Grand Theft Auto has already begun. Rockstar president Sam Houser didn't pretend it would be easy. He called the job of following up San Andreas "a nightmare". The core team at Rockstar North numbered 220 people. By the end, the effort would pull in studios across the company and a full team of over 1,000.
The first decision was the name. San Andreas and Vice City had dropped the numbers, but this game would bring them back. The team wanted the title to signal a leap in production as big as the one from Grand Theft Auto 2 to Grand Theft Auto 3. Producer Leslie Benzies estimated the budget passed $100 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made. Some key members worked 12-hour days, often without holidays. Then the team went to New York. In March or April 2005, 60 to 70 Rockstar North staff spent a week and a half there. Police officers who had worked the beat drove them around Washington Heights. How many photos they took depends on who you ask. Benzies said over 100,000, while art director Aaron Garbut put it closer to 250,000. Back in Scotland, New York footage played on office televisions, so artists could look up and see the city.
They weren't building a replica, though. Garbut wanted a caricature of the city people knew from film and books, and he called New York "an amazing, diverse, vibrant, cinematic city". The new map was roughly three times the size of GTA 3's Liberty City. It was smaller than San Andreas, but the team argued its height and density made up the difference. They wanted fewer dead spots, like San Andreas's empty deserts. Brighton Beach, home to many Eastern Europeans, became Hove Beach. Writer Dan Houser called Liberty City "the biggest character" in the game. But the man walking through it mattered just as much. Niko Bellic is an Eastern European war veteran trying to escape his past. Houser saw him as a more rounded character than earlier leads, someone who saves innocent people yet can be a cold-hearted killer. The script, written with Rupert Humphries, ran about 1,000 pages. Around 660 actors recorded over 80,000 lines of dialogue.
That dialogue also marked a break with the series' past. Earlier games had leaned on movie references, and Houser wanted something "fresh and new" instead. Better facial animation allowed slower cutscenes. Even failing a mission was rewritten, with fresh lines on a retry so it felt "less like Groundhog Day". Niko also carried a mobile phone, which the team felt reflected how society now lived. San Andreas had been about excess. This game was about focus. Development ended on April 17, 2008, when the game went to manufacturing. It launched that month on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with Windows following in December. Critics praised the story and the open world. It earned $310 million in its first day, becoming the fastest-selling entertainment product in history at the time. The nightmare, it turned out, paid rather well. An online mode let up to 32 players share the city.
Rockstar wasn't finished with Liberty City. Two expansion packs followed, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Each brought a new protagonist and a new plot woven into Niko's story. The same streets now carried three overlapping lives. Rockstar had proved that one detailed city could hold a whole generation's worth of stories. Its next game would test how much money one world could make. On September 17, 2013, Grand Theft Auto 5 reached PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, months later than Rockstar had planned. It had been aimed at the second quarter of that year, then pushed back for more polish. The wait didn't hurt. In its first day, the game earned $800 million. Within three days, it passed $1 billion. Nothing in entertainment had ever sold faster. The game behind that record rested on a gamble: one story, told by three criminals instead of one.
The work had started back in 2008, around the time GTA 4 came out. Rockstar North led the project, but the team grew past 1,000 people, with staff from Rockstar studios around the world. The studio's own RAGE engine was overhauled to draw the world farther into the distance. By then, Rockstar knew the PS3 and Xbox 360 well, and it pushed them harder than in any earlier game. Analysts put the combined development and marketing budget at more than $265 million. If they're right, it was the most expensive game ever made at that time. The three-lead idea wasn't new. It was first raised while the team was making San Andreas, but the hardware of the time made it impossible. The 2009 GTA 4 expansions, each with its own protagonist, showed the team what several lives in one city could look like. So GTA 5 put you in control of all three at once. Ned Luke played Michael De Santa, a retired bank robber. Shawn Fonteno played Franklin Clinton, a street gangster. Steven Ogg played Trevor Philips, a drug dealer and gunrunner. You could switch between them during missions and outside them, and the story was built around heists.
Rockstar also fixed what had bothered players last time. The team refined the shooting and cover system and reworked the driving to correct GTA 4's awkward vehicle controls. The bigger job was the map. Key members of the world team took research trips across Southern California, shooting photos and video. They used Google Maps projections of Los Angeles to design Los Santos's roads, and studied census data and documentaries to copy the city's demographic spread. The team called the open world the most technically demanding part of the whole production. The city sounded as dense as it looked. Rockstar licensed more than 241 tracks across fifteen radio stations, plus two talk stations. Some music was written for the game, including Flying Lotus's original work for FlyLo FM, the station he hosts. The marketing went further still. A website for a fictional cult, The Epsilon Program, offered fans the chance to appear in the game as members. That's one way to build a mailing list. Reviewers responded with what Metacritic calls universal acclaim. They praised the three-lead formula and the heists, though some disagreed about the story and characters. IGN went furthest.
IGN called it one of the very best video games ever made. And Rockstar kept selling it. An enhanced version was announced at E3 2014 and arrived on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 18, 2014. It added denser traffic, better weather, new wildlife and a first-person view, which forced the team to overhaul the animation system. The PC version slipped to April 14, 2015, for what Rockstar called polish. It ran at 60 frames per second in 4K and came with the Rockstar Editor for capturing and cutting gameplay video. A third generation followed. The Expanded and Enhanced version was announced in June 2020 and released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on March 15, 2022. Not everyone was pleased. Its September 2021 trailer became one of the most-disliked videos on PlayStation's YouTube channel, as fans questioned why Rockstar kept returning to GTA 5 instead of making a new game. Meanwhile, planned single-player DLC had been scrapped, its resources moved to GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption 2. A reported source code leak in December 2023 showed at least eight cancelled expansions, including one set in Liberty City. The story mode had stopped growing. The money had found somewhere else to live.
October 1, 2013. Two weeks after GTA 5 hit shelves, Rockstar switched on its online world, and much of it didn't work. Players couldn't connect to the servers or the Social Club service. Others watched the game freeze while loading early missions. Rockstar pushed a technical patch on October 5. It also suspended the microtransaction system, the part that let you buy content with real money, as a fail-safe. That pause matters for this story, because the store would become the most important feature in the game. The second week went no better. Some players reported that their character progress had simply disappeared. Another patch landed on October 10, and anyone with problems was told not to recreate their avatar. Then Rockstar said sorry in the only currency it could print on demand. Every player who had connected since launch received GTA $500,000 in in-game money. That's a generous apology, and it cost the company nothing it couldn't make again with a keystroke.
Critics split hard. Destructoid's Chris Carter called it a "messy launch" that should have been delayed. IGN's Keza MacDonald described "disastrous" sessions, and Digital Spy's Liam Martin lost his character data outright. GameSpot's Mark Walton called the player-versus-player mode an "unending cycle of pointless slaughter." Yet VideoGamer's Jon Denton argued its "endlessness" made up for the problems. The awards couldn't agree either. It won Best Multiplayer at the 10th British Academy Games Awards. Game Revolution and Hardcore Gamer nominated it for Biggest Disappointment. Here's the thing those early reviews couldn't measure. Rockstar North had built Online alongside the story mode as a separate experience, a world meant to keep evolving. So it kept getting free updates. The San Andreas Flight School update gave players better payouts to try neglected aircraft missions. Then came the 2015 Heists update, and the critics turned. Digital Spy's Martin praised its "pinpoint coordination." Eurogamer's Rich Stanton enjoyed the planning. By 2019, The Diamond Casino and Resort won Best Game Expansion at the Golden Joystick Awards.
The free updates had a business underneath them. Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, said that by February 2014, 70 percent of GTA 5 players with internet access had already played Online. It also named the microtransaction system as the largest contributor in its results. The same store Rockstar had switched off in week one was now carrying the company. You didn't pay for the heists. You paid to afford what came with them. Keeping one world alive meant leaving some players behind. In September 2015, Rockstar said the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions would get no new content, citing console limits. Forbes writer Paul Tassi said Rockstar was "cutting out a lot of potential customers." The old servers shut down for good on December 16, 2021. Fixes sometimes came from outside, too. In early 2021, a user called t0st cut loading times by up to 70% with an unofficial patch. Rockstar adopted it in March and paid out $10,000 from its Bug Bounty program.
On March 15, 2022, Online arrived as a standalone game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, free on PlayStation for its first three months. The same month, Rockstar launched GTA+, a paid monthly subscription with permanent in-game benefits and exclusive content. By September 2023, it even bundled classic games like the Trilogy's Definitive Edition. In March 2025, PC players got all of it through a free upgrade. The world that couldn't hold a save in 2013 now charged rent every month. Whatever came next would need a reason to leave it. On December 4, 2023, Rockstar lost control of its own birthday party. The first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer was meant to premiere that month for the company's 25th anniversary. Instead, a low-quality copy leaked a day early. Rockstar answered by publishing the real thing right away. It revealed the title, the two leads, the setting, the release window and the consoles. Within two days it had 101 million views. That's more than GTA 5's 2011 reveal trailer had gathered in its entire lifetime. After a decade away, the series was heading back to Vice City.
The road there was longer than the trailer let on. Preliminary work began in 2014, after GTA 5 shipped, and pre-production on Project Americas started in 2015. Rockstar hoped to build it alongside Red Dead Redemption 2. Then that western's ambition grew, and every studio was pooled onto it. Grand Theft Auto 6 waited. Early development began in late 2018, and principal production followed in 2020. By then the company had changed shape: 2,441 employees when Red Dead 2 shipped, 4,711 across 12 offices during this game. Rockstar also said it wanted to avoid the crunch that marked Red Dead 2, offering paid time off or extra pay for extra hours. Secrecy became its own department. Rockstar confirmed the game in February 2022, and that September, footage from unfinished builds leaked in what journalists called one of the most prominent leaks in industry history. Rockstar North's Edinburgh office later needed privacy film on its windows to stop drones photographing through them. Personal phones and laptops were blocked from company systems, USB drives were banned and photography at work was forbidden. Staff were told to return to offices from April 2024. The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain called that a broken promise on flexible work. In October 2025, Rockstar fired 34 employees over leaked confidential information, and the union accused it of union busting. Even the windows needed an NDA.
What all that secrecy protected was a place. The first research trip to Miami took place in 2015, and a dedicated research team was based in the city. They met, in their words, "anyone notorious or influential who'll take our calls," from police to club promoters to former criminals. Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head, said Florida and Miami have "perhaps one of the most diverse and interesting populations in the world." More than 50 street artists designed murals, including for Stockyard, based on Wynwood. Miami stylist Jillian Carr built a fashion ecosystem, and her summary doubles as the game's thesis. The story breaks one of the series' oldest habits. Earlier games kept romance in the background. Grand Theft Auto 6 follows Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, a criminal duo in what Rupert Humphries, Rockstar's senior vice president of narrative, called "a Bonnie and Clyde-type narrative." Their state is Leonida, a stand-in for Florida, and its satire aims at 2020s American culture. Writer Michael Wiafe said the team wanted "a sense of discovery" instead of repeated clichés. Then, on May 6, 2025, the second trailer landed. It drew a record 475 million views across all platforms in 24 hours.
The release date slipped twice before landing on November 19, 2026, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. On June 18, 2026, Rockstar unveiled the cover art and special editions. The preorder bonus says it plainly: a Vintage Vice City Pack inspired by the 2002 game and Tommy Vercetti. Rockstar told Kinda Funny there'd be no microtransactions in either edition at launch, though players and journalists criticized content locked behind the Ultimate Edition. Physical copies will hold download codes instead of discs, to stop leaks and reselling. A series that spent a decade charging rent online is going home to the city that built its formula. On November 19, you'll find out whether home still fits.
The legacy: So how did a cop game that missed every deadline become the biggest name in entertainment? It kept betting on scale, and it kept getting paid for it. A $5 million Vice City built the neon formula in about nine months. GTA 5 cost an estimated $265 million and returned $1 billion in three days. Along the way came lawsuits, a messy Online launch and more controversy than any series in history, according to Guinness. None of it slowed the climb. Going back to Vice City isn't nostalgia, then. It's the setting that proved the formula, finally given the budget it never had in 2002. Work on GTA 6 began in 2014, and it's slated for 2026. Its first trailer leaked a day early on December 4, 2023, and still hit 101 million views in two days. Race'n'Chase was supposed to wrap by July 1, 1996. Rockstar has never been great with deadlines, and it's never needed to be. That's the Pulse. Play something good this week.
The full ranking
- 8Grand Theft Auto
- 7Grand Theft Auto III
- 6Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
- 5Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- 4Grand Theft Auto IV
- 3Grand Theft Auto V
- 2Grand Theft Auto Online
- 1Grand Theft Auto VI
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